1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the Internet and the World Wide Web (web) and, more particularly, to methods for determining the relatedness of web sites and web pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has become a convenient and popular medium for the exchange of information and the transacting of commerce. An Internet user has access to a vast number of web sites on the World Wide Web and this number is increasing at a rapid pace. For any one web site (hereinafter “subject web site”), there frequently exist numerous other related web sites that offer the same or similar information, services, or products.
A number of systems and methods are known for identifying links to web sites, or pages thereof, that are related to a web site or other item of interest (hereinafter “related links”). One method for identifying related links involves examining link structures of web pages to identify relationships between particular pages or sites. For example, a relationship between web sites A and B may be deemed to exist if a significant portion of the web pages having links to A also have links to B. Another method involves performing a text-based analysis of web pages to identify pages or sites with similar content.
The related links identified through these or other methods may be presented to the user through a special client program, which may be a browser plug-in, that displays metadata for the web site or page currently being viewed. The client program typically retrieves the metadata on a URL-by-URL basis from a metadata server. A client program and associated service that operate in this manner are commercially available from Alexa Internet, the assignee of the present application. The related links may also be displayed in other contexts, such as in conjunction with search results from an Internet search engine.
One limitation associated with using link structures and textual content of web pages to identify related links is that large numbers of web pages generally must be retrieved and parsed in order to obtain satisfactory results. Another limitation is that the breadth of the related links data is typically dependent upon the ability of a web crawling program to locate web pages. Because of these limitations, the resulting related links may be based on only a small percentage of existing web pages. The present invention seeks to overcome these limitations while providing an additional measure of the relatedness of web sites.